I did my POC on an evaluation machine (Hyper-V) that I downloaded from the Microsoft website. If you are not familiar with Server Core you can read about the benefits at Microsoft Technet: Why Is Server Core Useful?

What to download in order to install EPiServer on Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core?

Below is a list of files that I ended up downloading from the supplied links.

This is the one that I used, but I don’t see how other versions should be too much of a problem.

How to install EPiServer on Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core

After extracting the virtual machine and importing it into the Hyper-V Manager, connect to it and hit the start button. The first time you open this image, you will be asked to supply a password for the Administrator account. Do it, and copy what you’ve downloaded to the server.

.NET Framework 4 won’t install unless you first upgrade your server to SP1, so run the file windows6.1-KB976932-X64.exe from the command prompt and you will be presented with the installation wizard. Tick the automatically restart computer checkbox and let it install the service pack.

Install PowerShell 3 on Server Core

Before we can install Windows PowerShell 3 onto our machine, we will need to enable .NET Framework 2.0 and PowerShell 2. This is done by the following commands; DISM is the Deployment Image Servicing and Management utility.

PowerShell 3 will require us to have .NET Framework 4.0 installed on the server, so run the file dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64_SC.exe from the command prompt and use the installation wizard. Next install Windows Management Framework 3.0 which will contain PS3; I used the file Windows6.1-KB2506143-x64.msu. The installation will require another server restart.

Install Microsoft SQL Server Express Edition on Server Core

Install SQL Express by running the installation program from the command prompt; make sure you use the correct version or you will encounter a few nasty errors. That’s SQLEXPR_x64_ENU.exe for the 64-bit version in this article.

Make sure that you select Mixed Mode as Authentication Mode when you get to the Database Engine Configuration step in the installation process.

Install EPiServer CMS 6 R2 on Server Core

Now it’s finally time to install EPiServer; run the Setup.exe file from the command prompt. You can also install a site with a SQL database at this point. Notice that the installation process will report an error at the very end after everything is commited; this is because it is trying to open a browser and surf to your new website.

Viewing the EPiServer site from your host

If you have set up your Hyper-V configurations correctly and is still unable to access your virtual environment, you might need configure the Server Core Windows Firewall. I turned it off by using the following command (thank you Jens Engfors at Basefarm).

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off

A list of all the installed features – oclist

If you run the command oclist you will get a list of all the features that are installed as well as not installed. These are the installed ones from my working environment. Depending on your needs, you may also want to enable others such as for instance IIS-BasicAuthentication and certificate related ones.

As the error message says, the file WindowsBase.dll cannot be located. As I was not really interested in installing the Alloy Tech templates I decided not to dive any deeper into this error; a quick Google search though, pointed towards it having something to do with Visual Studio.